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RE: qualitative decline of xsl-list questions

2002-12-03 11:24:09
XSLT is also being used a lot more now than it was even a year ago. 
There are maybe 20 or 30 people who have been contributing to this list
for the last 3 or 4 years (some more than others! Speaking of which - is
Jeni just really busy, or is she being distracted by some shiny new
technology? *grin*). Since XSLT has become "mainstream", the *average*
quality of posts has gone down. This is only to be expected, since the
people who were doing things with XSLT in 1998/9 were people who are
actually interested in technology for technology's sake, whereas the
bulk of people coming into the technology now are doing it because they
have been told they must use XSLT. However, there are still enough
interesting posts to make up for the dross (though coming in every day
to several hundred emails makes it more difficult to find them...)

I've had an "interesting" time in the last couple of years trying to get
people in my company to understand what they are doing when they are
coding in XSLT. Most of them have come through the ranks as self-taught
HTML coders who learnt a bit of JavaScript, and then went on to slightly
more advanced languanges, before coming across XSLT. I've had to run
internal training sessions to get them up the (not small) learning curve
that goes with learning XSLT (or, for that matter, any FP language).
Most other companies do not have someone who can do this, so the same
questions I get while training people tend to get asked to the list.

A lot more XSLT projects, but still not too many pure "XSLT
developers" 
on anybody's payroll that I can see. From what I've seen out in the 
field, many IT managers are throwing these XSLT projects into the laps

of people who know nothing about XSLT. 
Going back to Chuck's point about pure XSLT developers - I've been using
XSLT for nearly 4 years, we as a company have developed (and maintain)
many sites which use XSLT, and yet still I spend most of my time writing
in other languages. There are very few people on this list who work for
commercial companies who do spend the bulk of their time using XSLT
afaik... Mike Kay, Jeni (though she had to start her own company), and
maybe a few others.

Rgs,

Ben


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